What Needs to Happen Next?

While the UDHR, the Geneva Convention on Refugees and UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHRC) all provide security and protection for migrants and victims of forced migration and displacement, no agency or body of international law has been modified to include climate refugees. I believe that special policy must be created to protect the rights of climate refugees and this policy can be easily introduced into pre-existing bodies of the UN and its Refugee and Climate laws.

Article 3 of the UDHR states that all people have the rights to life, liberty and security of persons. In the wake of climate change, the idea of an individual's right to life and right to security need to be expanded to encompass the realities of global warming. Communities and regions around the world can not be guaranteed a right to security and life in their homelands as rising tides and changes in climate patterns make survival nearly, if not entirely, impossible.

Separate from the arena of refugee creation due to natural disasters, a reality that humanity has experienced since its inception, the refugees of climate change result from humans' pollution and environmental destruction. Conflicts resulting from resource scarcity, droughts and increased frequency of disasters due to altered climate patterns and the total destruction and loss of land from rising sea levels, are three of the major threats to communities around the world. These individuals should be given refugee status in escaping life threatening situations that result from climate change.

Because there is no one group or leader responsible for climate change, it is difficult to hold climate refugees under the same status as political refugees. Yet the plight of climate refugees is similar to refugees of war or political oppression, as both must leave their homelands due to fear or lack of opportunity, both of which are caused by people infringing on their human rights. The UNEP, the UNDP and the Hague continue to discuss the pressing problem of providing aid to climate refugees. Resolutions on the issue range from establishing resettlement centers to providing additional aid to Small Island Developing States and other regions most vulnerable to sea level rise and the resulting loss of land and the displacement of people. I feel that placing language within the UNHRC laws as well as noting climate refugees within climate change policy overseen by the UNEP is the first step that must be taken. By taking this action, development policy surrounding climate change and refugees will more clearly work to address to the needs of this growing group of refugees world wide. Rather than allowing climate change to continue to create new populations of refugees that are unprotected by the state, policy and development focused on these communities can place a human face on the realities of climate change and better protect the human rights threatened in the 21st century.

Al Jazeera's 2009 piece on the increasing number of climate refugees in South East Asia